Lindëfirion RP maps

Minecraft Middle Earth is a Minecraft community that recreates the world described by JRR Tolkien and his writings. Everyone can participate in organized events in which we collaborate to create major landmarks, terrain, caves, castles, towns, farms and more.

Head Designer

Those who are here already a bit longer may remember the town names Maegoth and Baraketta near Annúminas (on the old map).
While searching for possible Public Projects locations I remembered these, I knew they were not canon, thus I wanted to know more about them and wanted to see whether the information given would fit the lore.

LotR wikia had a short article on Maegoth, along with a map. The source given for it was Lindefirion.com, a finnish role playing community. Their maps they "loosely based on Middle-Earth Role Playing" (MERP) , of which I do not know much.

In their maps section they have a detailed online map of Gondor with many additional locations; There is also one of Eriador around, but seeemingly not available on their page; here's the excerpt from the wiki:

Now what it's all about is, whether we may consider using these maps as inspiration for our project. The maps are set at around the middle of the 3rd age (1000 - 1500 years before our map), arnorian towns would be thoroughly abandoned, while gondorian would still be inhabited.

Imo it would be an easy way of one hand populate areas of the map that we have no informations on, and it also would make sense that beside the bigger cities tolkien wrote about are also some small towns. I would especially check whether the names given seem feasible in terms of whether they even could be elvish (e.g. only use sounds and sound combinations that are allowed in elvish) and whether I can find out the meaning of them.

Please submit your opinion on this via the poll above, especially though I wanna tag @q220, @Credoo and maybe for a quick overall lore / feasibility check @JordD04 and @Fornad

One Of Us

I have always said that there's no problem going outside the lore as long as it makes sense in the Lore and dosen't contradict anything Tolkien has already said. I think that applies in this case aswell.
As long as the towns/cities are in sensible locations and they don't end up in places where Tolkien said other things existed (extreme example; building a little town where Minas Tirith should be) I think it's absolutely fine to use these sort of things. At the end of the day Tolkien was never going to document every settlement in the world, I'm sure he wanted others to be there, plus he was always advocate of people coming up with their own ideas for ME.

I'm not so confident with the Evlish as you are @Finrod_Amandil so I'd probably leave the name checking to you, but even if there is a problem with a name we can just make one up. I would also suggest keeping track of non-canonical cities to make them easier to find in the future.

Aspiring Commoner

I think we should definitely add in some additional settlements and towns in Eriador (Arnor would have initially been comparable to Gondor in population, if not even a bit more), though as far as names go several of the ones on that map sound decidedly un-Tolkien to my (admittedly untrained) ears. Barchetta in particular doesn't seem to fit at all.

Foreman

At the moment I think Arnor has room for improvement and adding more towns and vilages will make the area seem more realistic and more fun to explore, however the position of Maegoth if accurately placed would be very close to Annuminas.

One Of Us

I think the maps are a great source if we want to add things in empty areas. But in some circumstances, we can't really add the entire map because of scale problems. Can't add maegoth for example. Annuminas is already in place.
So inspiration source but not a lore source

Aspiring Commoner

Look what was done in Rohan....lots of little towns all over the place, add a really nice touch. Also look how detailed the Shire is. Shire has about half the towns on the map (although each town itself is small). No reason why places like Western Gondor can have a slew of small towns as well.

Eriador is sparsely populated though, so anything added in there would have to be ruins. And I wouldn't really be so sure about ruins either. Places like Osgiliath or even Ost-en-Edsel are still around because their constructions were of high nature and epic. Small villages, which did not have a lot of thought put into their construction, would probably not last the test of time.

Head Designer

Eriador is sparsely populated though, so anything added in there would have to be ruins. And I wouldn't really be so sure about ruins either. Places like Osgiliath or even Ost-en-Edsel are still around because their constructions were of high nature and epic. Small villages, which did not have a lot of thought put into their construction, would probably not last the test of time.

That's right, the maps are set in middle of Third Age; Arnor is at that point already separated and Cardolan gets defeated just around that time; the other two would do so 400 years later. So yes, all the arnorian cities would be abandoned since 1000 - 1500 years, however they were assumingly stone buildings and some remainings could still be visible.

Slab Fanatic

Some of these would be cities, with stone buildings that would withstand the ages (somewhat). However, I would say that any non-canon city would be smaller than the few that are actually written about, and thus not all buildings would be stone. Also like seafroggys said the towns would be mostly wood so there would be even less.

Aspiring Commoner

That's right, the maps are set in middle of Third Age; Arnor is at that point already separated and Cardolan gets defeated just around that time; the other two would do so 400 years later. So yes, all the arnorian cities would be abandoned since 1000 - 1500 years, however they were assumingly stone buildings and some remainings could still be visible.

Hey, it's ok to link those things but in the future can you tell people they're download links? A lot of people don't appreciate when they click a link that downloads something without any indication that it's a download.